July 19, 2005

Neighborhood segregation in the United States

Blacks are currently the most segregated population in the United States, but they have also experienced the largest decline in segregation, leading to the projection that Latinos will become the most segregated population in the future.

Timberlake and Iceland examined all 323 of the nation's metropolitan areas, using Census data from 1970-2000. They searched for trends by exploring four key measures of residential inequality: dissimilarity, entropy, isolation and net difference. The researchers focused on four racial and ethnic groups: Caucasians, African Americans, Asians and Latinos. "African Americans continue to be the most segregated group from whites, but we also found that on average, African Americans have experienced greater declines in segregation," Timberlake says. "So, if that trend continues, Latinos will become the most segregated population by the middle-to-end of the next decade," he says.

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